Rioting continued for a 12th day in the Kabylie capital of Tizi-Ouzou yesterday, amid Algerian newspaper reports that 80 young people have lost their lives in the crackdown by the gendarmerie. Demonstrations by students at the University of Algiers strengthened fears that unrest could spread outside the mountainous region.
Ms Malika Matoub, the sister of the popular Kabyle singer Lounes Matoub, who was assassinated in 1998, compared the Kabylie riots to the Palestinian Intifada. She asked for international protection for the Kabyles, who along with other ethnic Berbers make up a quarter of Algeria's population. "They shoot unarmed people. They fire at balconies, on children. We are pacifists and will remain so," she said.
As in the Israeli-occupied territories, funerals are followed by renewed battles between young men throwing rocks and gendarmes firing tear-gas and live ammunition. The departure of the gendarmerie is one of the rioters' main demands.
The violence started when a young Kabyle named Massinissa Guermah was murdered in a gendarmerie station in Matoub's home village of Beni Douala on April 18th.
President Abdel-Aziz Bouteflika was scheduled to speak on television last night for the first time since the riots started. Mr Bouteflika was severely criticised for attending a four-day conference on AIDS in Nigeria last week, while security forces were shooting dozens of Algerians dead and wounding hundreds more.
When Mr Bouteflika was elected two years ago he vowed to end the war between Islamic fundamentalists and the military that has killed more than 150,000 people since 1992.
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